17. Chapter 17
Chapter seventeen
Layla
F or the next few days, Tad comes for me, and I’m taken to a lab where I work alone. Each day, Julian and his wolves come to me. Each day, I’m snarled at and stared at with black, expectant eyes, as if I can work miracles overnight. I’m not a doctor, and I, in fact, scream that at him. His wolves all but rip my throat out. One even bites me. I’m taken back to my room with stitches, and Jensen is furious. I’m barely able to calm him down.
“We’ll find the ICE stock,” he whispers. “Then we’ll get out of here, but we have to move fast. The Renegades will come for me. For us.”
Apparently, they’ve been taking Jensen to walk the facility and act like one of their own, trying to convince everyone the Renegades are joining them, as Jensen is close to Caleb. No other explanation would seem possible. He’s looking for the ICE stock as well, but I’ve been captive in a tiny room. I have no recourse to find anything. He has more than me.
I push to my toes and whisper, “What if they think we’re dead?”
He doesn’t comfort me on this. In fact, when I pull back and look into his eyes, I know he fears the same. But our food arrives before I can press. Steak and potatoes tonight. I wonder how many more days I have of learning nothing to help Julian before we’ll get bologna.
By day four, I’m placed in a lab with about a dozen scientists, all working under clear duress. The room is a ball of tension, racing about and growing bigger and stronger each moment. When lunch is called, everyone is taken away but me and one other scientist who has been the only one who’s dared be friendly.
We eat our sandwiches together, and he tells me a bit about the top secret military lab he’d run for years. Neither of us are doctors, though, and we feel the help of Chin, whom I met once, would offer us more success, but we both agree we don’t dare ask. “I’m sure we’re being recorded,” I say, eating the Twinkie they gave me for dessert. “Hopefully they know we need him. You think the others are coming back?” I ask, looking around the large empty space.
“They seem to test how we perform in small and large groups. Obviously, we’re being tested.” He runs his hands down his legs. “I better get to work.”
An hour that feels like an eternity later, I sit at a table in the confines of a laboratory, staring at the slide under the viewer, studying what I’m told is Julian’s six-month-old, Dorian’s, DNA. After only a glimpse at Dorian yesterday, I can say definitively that he looks more like he’s twelve. Per the medical reports I’ve been provided, he’s estimated to be aging at the rate of two years a month. And the only thing more terrifying than his growth rate is the fact that I now know that it’s his DNA that’s supplying the drug I’m ingesting to stay alive.
A folder lands on the table in front of me, and hot breath touches my neck from behind. “Open it.”
Tad.
I know his voice as well as one might know a recurring bad dream, and all too vividly. I flip open the file to find a photo of Jensen, Julian, and Julian’s wolves, not sure what the point is, though I’m certain it’s a threat I’ll soon understand. I flip to the next photo and the next, all of which are more of the same. Jensen with Julian and his wolves, all seemingly taken at different locations.
Tad rotates my chair around, his hands planted on the table on either side of me, his big body too close. I can feel the heat of him, and it turns my stomach. I want to shove him away, but I tamp down the desire, fully aware of how he’ll punish me if I do. “That’s Julian he’s with,” he says, as if I don’t know this already. “He’s one of us. He wants to be Julian’s second, and he’s promised to fuck you into submission to get that title.”
He clearly missed Jensen telling me about the change in Julian, before he shocked Jensen by becoming a modern-day Hitler, or the fact that Jensen’s been paraded about the facility in a manipulation tactic, which means that be it past or present, the photos mean nothing.
And I wonder if there is no audio recording in the room. Just a visual? Whatever the case, deep down in my core, I trust Jensen. “Why would you tell me this if it’s what Julian wants?”
“Because I’m Julian’s second,” he says. “And Jensen means to replace me. I’m going to kill him before he has the chance. So, I suggest you make it clear you’re loyal to me, or I’ll see you thrown in one of the sex camps.” He shoves off the table.
I have no idea why I do it, but I challenge him. “I know he worked with Julian while he had his wolves. That proves nothing. And isn’t this being recorded?”
The next thing I know, he’s whipped my chair around again, and he’s pressing his hands to the arms. “I turned off the cameras. I could kill you, and he wouldn’t know.”
He being Julian, I assume. “He’d figure it out.” I sound brave, but I’m quaking inside.
He grinds his teeth and pushes off my chair, removing his cellphone and doing something before he says, “Listen up.” He hits a button with his thumb.
A recording starts to play.
I hear Julian say, “Then you’ll join me?”
“Yes,” Jensen agrees, and my stomach knots with that one word. “I’ll join you.”
“Fuck her into submission,” Julian orders. “I’ll turn off the cameras.”
Now I want to be sick.
“How will I know they’re off?” Jensen asks. “I’m not your freak show.”
“You’ll have to take my word for it.”
“I’ll rip them out,” Jensen promises.
“Fine. Do it. You will walk out of this room with me and stand before my men by my side. Understood?”
Jensen’s reply makes me go colder than ice. “Why are we still standing here?”
Tad smirks. “Now you believe me?”
“What do you want?”
“You. And I promise it will be better than the sex camps. You’ll only have me to deal with.” He grins an evil grin, rotates on his heels, and marches to the back office.
Just the words “sex camps” are enough to cut me inside out. With an inner tremble, my gaze slides around the lab, seeking an escape, and to my utter shock, the water glass on my table shatters, my body jerking with the shock.
Milton Wright, the only other non-GTECH scientist out of the six I’ve met since leaving Jensen in the room and the only one working with me at present, rushes to my table and begins anxiously clearing the glass. According to him during a whispered exchange, he’s thirty-two and worked for the military until he was kidnapped and forced to help Julian.
“That was odd,” he murmurs, tossing shards into the trash. “The glass just shattered. I never saw you touch it.”
He’s right, and it’s not the first glass to shatter. There was another earlier, not long after I got here, but before Milton was brought in to help me. “What’s a sex camp?”
His thin lips press together, his energy uncomfortable, as he claims the chair next to me and lowers his voice. “Julian’s son, Dorian, is very powerful. Like freaky powerful.”
“I’ve gathered that, but what does that have to do with sex camps?”
“They want more like him, which means finding the rare woman who can bond with one of the males and convert to GTECH. It’s like a physical marriage. They have sex. They bond. They have scary offspring, like Dorian.”
My hand presses to the table, memories of Jensen’s brief mention of this washing over me. “How do they know they bond? They just get pregnant, or what?”
“Some strange tattoo marking appears on the woman’s neck right after sex. I hear it hurts, like someone is carving it into their flesh. The couple then does a blood exchange, and the woman converts to GTECH.”
“Blood exchange?” I ask, aghast at such an idea. “Like in a vampire novel?”
“Well, I guess.” He laughs nervously. “They don’t bite each other, though. They slice their palms and press them together. There is a plus side for the female. The plus side of all of this is eternal youth and immunity to all human illness, among other things. Of course, the poor woman has a really nasty Zodius soldier hanging around all the time, and if he goes and gets himself killed, say by pissing off Julian, then she goes bye-bye right along with him. One dies, the other dies. Or so they think. It’s not fully known if that’s the case. There are just too few lifebonds. That’s what they call them: lifebond.”
Lord, help me and us all. I think I understand now. Women are being thrown into the camp and used for sex until someone bonds with them. And I officially want to throw up.
“The idea that they breed women I assume they kidnap is just plain barbaric,” I say, pausing as he wipes his forehead with a cloth, and it’s only then that I realize he doesn’t look good. His skin is milky, and sweat pebbles on his upper lip and forehead. His white lab jacket is damp under his arms. “Are you okay, Milton?”
He runs his hands over his thighs. “They didn’t dose me this morning.”
My eyes go wide. “Why? Why would they do that?”
“I’ve failed to find the answers they seek. You’re the new kid on the block. They don’t need me anymore. Out with me. In with you.”
I draw back, shocked at the harshness of his words.
He scrubs his jaw. “I’m sorry. I’m not myself. It feels like I’ve swallowed acid, and it’s eating me alive.”
I soften and touch his hand to console him. It’s clammy, yet he shivers as if cold. A buzzer sounds, and the electronic steel doors, the only entrance or exit to the lab, slide open. Julian walks into the room dressed in Army green fatigues, a wolf on either side of him, power radiating off of him.
Beside him is his son, Dorian, dressed in matching fatigues and looking every bit twelve at six months old. I’d seen him from a distance earlier, but up close, it’s simply incredible. Julian halts at the end of the table and motions to Dorian. “Meet my son, who cured you of your cancer.”
The boy’s gaze fixes on me; the black of his stare so deep, so complete, it feels as if I’m being sucked into a hole. “Thank you, Dorian,” I say softly, hoping the obligation I feel to say the words won’t seem obvious.
“What good news do you have for me, Milton?”
Julian’s question jolts my attention from Dorian to Milton, who looks as if he’s about to choke on his tongue.
I quickly interject, pulling the attention back to me. “Since every ICE user who goes into withdrawal doesn’t die, pre-existing conditions, or some inconsistency in the ICE doses, would be an obvious place to begin looking for cause of death.”
“Read the files, Ms. Walters,” Julian snaps. “There were no pre-existing conditions and no difference in one vial of ICE from the next.”
“That’s impossible.”
“And yet, it’s true.”
“That we know of—”
“No pre-existing conditions and no difference in one vial of ICE to the next,” Julian repeats. “Your failure to be more informed disappoints me.” He cuts his gaze to Dorian. “Show the lady what happens to people who disappoint me.”
The boy’s lips curl, his dark eyes expressive, excited as if he’s been rewarded with a toy, and I’m the toy. He raises his hands, and the wolves charge at me. A scream rips through my lips, and I scramble to my feet and back up, hitting a concrete beam, trapped as the wolves halt so close their breaths fan the bottom of my lab coat.
Dorian laughs a laugh of pure evil. “I do believe she’s frightened, Father.”
My gaze swings toward Milton in the misdirected hope of intervention. He’s still sitting, his head on the table, his body shaking. He’s dying.
With bravado I don’t feel, I appeal to Julian. “I’ll do what you want. But please, I need Milton’s help. Don’t make him suffer.”
“I take it from your desire to cling to the aid of this human scientist that my scientific team has displeased you?”
“I’ve barely had time to evaluate anyone’s value, but killing off resources won’t help us win the scientific battle.”
“You would be better served to focus on the big picture and not on a few humans without purpose.”
“I’m human,” I say softly.
“You’re female,” he states. “You’ll soon learn how purposeful that is around here.”
He means I’ll be a sex experiment, but I block out my fear of such a thing. “If you really want answers, punishing me for speaking up and killing off Milton before I know his usefulness is wasting time.”
Julian grimaces, but surprises me by waving at Dorian. “Give him the drug.”
“As you wish, Father,” Dorian complies, approaching Milton, the evil he reeks of ravishing me with dread of his nearness. A sense of something not being right settles hard in my stomach. Dorian grabs a handful of Milton’s hair and jerks his head backward, shoving a pill in his mouth.
Oh God . Panic rushes through me. “That wasn’t ICE! What did you give him?”
Dorian’s attention settles hard on me, callousness beyond his age etching his finely carved features as he slams Milton’s face into the table.
My stomach rolls at the hard crash of skull against wood.
“Lady,” Dorian says, tilting his head to study me as if I were a specimen to be evaluated. “I’ve given him what you wished for. He will suffer no more. This should please you.”
Milton convulses and falls off the chair to the ground.
“What does that mean?” I scream at them, the wolves snarling at me and warning me to hold my position. “What does that mean, he won’t suffer anymore?” I turn a pleading stare on Julian. “Julian, please! Please, help him. I’ll do anything you want.”
“You’ll do what I want, regardless,” he replies. “But it’ll be without him. He’s dead. And you are not the only scientist here with your expertise. But you are female, and I do not wish you dead, just motivated. So here is your motivation. Every time I feel you are failing me, I will kill one of the humans. And you are failing me. Consider Milton’s blood on your hands, Layla.”
I choke on my own breath, and this time it has nothing to do with cancer. This isn’t happening. It can’t be happening. I squeeze my eyes shut and tell myself this is a nightmare. I’ll wake up soon. It must be the side effects from the treatments in Germany.
A shift in the air has my eyes flying open, and suddenly, Julian is in front of me, the wolves parting to allow him to stand almost on top of me. I gasp, shocked at his nearness. He doesn’t touch me, yet I can almost feel his hands on my throat. I try to move, but it’s as if I’m frozen in place.
“I suggest you get to work,” Julian bites out, his voice low and poisonous. “Before I decide to kill another human simply because…well, it’s entertaining. Especially when I watch you worry for them.” He pauses as if for effect, then asks, “Am I clear?”
“Yes,” I whisper, but the word is barely audible.
For several seconds, he studies me, his features stony and intense. “Then do it,” he finally says. “And I’ll leave Milton here to remind you of the consequences of displeasing me.”
He gives me his back, his wolves following on his heels. Dorian falls into step beside his father, but not before casting me a mocking glance. The boy is pure evil. Born evil. Growing more so with each passing day.
And when I’m certain this day can’t get any worse—a second before the doors close—Tad’s big, obnoxious self steps inside.
“Good news, Layla. Sweetie. Darling. Honey bunch. We have some quality time together. I’m to look out for you.” He smiles and winks. Then he walks over to Milton and shoves him aside before claiming his chair. “You heard Julian,” he says. “Let’s get to work.” The doors open again, and I count six scientists in lab coats entering the room. We’re a regular assembly line of submission.
Anger, pain, and yes, fear collide inside me with a force so mighty, I think I might collapse. Something happens with that force inside me. Energy crackles in the air, and glass shatters in various locations of the lab. It’s as if my emotions are alive, like electricity in the air. My head spins, and my chest tightens. What is happening to me? Remotely, I hear Tad curse, then he’s on the floor, and so are the other scientists. They just drop like rocks and hit the concrete with hard thuds.
But I don’t.
What is happening?!
My fist balls at my chest, willing my heart to calm, but my hand is unsteady, shaky. I force myself to inhale and exhale and count to ten slowly. The dizziness subsides, and the room comes back into focus.
Then, and only then, do I scold myself for standing still. I race to Milton’s side and roll him over, cringing at his blank, open eyes as I check for a pulse I know I won’t find.
My stomach lurches, and I reach up to close his eyes. More glass around the room shatters as I whisper, “I’m sorry I didn’t save you.” But I don’t cry. The pain isn’t nearly as fierce as the anger eating me alive.
I push to my feet and glance around at the scientists, where they lie on the ground. Items in the room begin floating about. A chair jumps up and flips over, but I’m not afraid. I can feel the energy waving off of me—the power ICE created. There’s no other explanation. And I know I’m the reason everyone is on the ground. I walk to one of the scientists, relieved to find them alive, just knocked out. That means Tad is alive, too, and that’s as dangerous as it gets.
I glance at the locked doors and the badge around Tad’s neck, flat against his chest. Without allowing myself to think, I charge forward and bend over Tad, unclip the badge, dig for a wallet, retrieve a money clip, and luck out with a jackpot of three vials of ICE. I’ll have to buy more on the street, and I’ll figure that out later. I draw his weapon, thankful that my brother forced me to learn to shoot and confident with the steel in my hand. “Thank you, Kevin,” I whisper, thinking of my brother, who’d died in combat in Iraq, not long after my father, but I don’t waste any time on memories. I rush toward the door, desperate to get out of here.
In a flash, I’ve swiped the security panel. A light flashes green, but the doors don’t open. I punch the keypad next to the panel to find it requires a password. I try random, logical sequences. Nothing. I try again and again. My frustration and fear scratch at the energy in the room. Suddenly, water bursts from the fire sprinklers, and the doors open. Water gushes all over me as I rush out into the hallway, but I have no idea where to go next or how to find Jensen. Muffled voices sound to my right and I don’t want to leave without him but time is up. He’ll find me , I tell myself and I take off, running in the opposite direction.